I have completely revamped my pro-audio for Gentoo guide. It is now called Gentoo Studio, and is a complete, stand-alone guide for installing Gentoo from scratch for the purpose of creating a professional digital audio workstation.

The stage4 installation tarball is complete and ready for public testing. Please go to http://audiodef.com/projects.php?project_id=1 and follow the instructions under Installation Method A: Stage4. Please post comments and feedback to this thread.

The stage4 installation is the most recommended way to set up Gentoo Studio, because I've already worked out a lot of kinks and gotten stuff working where installation might not have been so straightforward, including a regular user account with real-time priorities under which to run JACK and other audio programs.

It is my intention to update the tarball on a monthly basis, but as I have been accepted into graduate school, if I can figure out how to pay for it, things might get very busy for me. Regardless, this project is important to me and I will do the best I can to be responsive and helpful to anyone trying it out.

Do you mean convert your existing Gentoo setup for pro-audio use (MIDI, recording/editing audio in real-time, etc.)? Yes, certainly. Just follow these sections in the DIY guide:

Configuring the kernel (copy the new kernel image to your boot partition after backing up the old one)
Configuring audio settings
Setting up a working environment (I assume you have xorg installed, so pick a lightweight DE or a WM you like)
Installing audio & MIDI programs
Testing your system

One of my machines decided to go on holiday without leave, so I decided to back up my data and use it as a physical test machine for the stage4. What I noticed is that formatting seems to fail in the disk setup script, but if I manually perform the steps exactly as they are in the script, there is no problem.

Qjackctl (0.3.8, 0.3.9 and 9999) require qt-xmlpatterns, or it will fail with the error described here. These are the modified ebuilds. Drop them into your local overlay to use. I have only tested compilation of 0.3.8, so please let me know if 0.3.9 or 9999 still fail with the above-mentioned error.

I was working on issues surrounding installing Openoctave from an ebuild when I came across this statement in the source README:

Code:

For Gentoo users: When building your kernel, Gentoo recommends you build alsa directly into the kernel.
In our testing, this has proved more stable than building alsa as modules.

That might be true, but I recommend that ALSA be compiled as modules anyway. If you need to troubleshoot sound issues, you'll have to reboot if you change certain things (driver conflicts, for example). If ALSA is compiled as modules, you can unload and reload them without having to reboot. I've never personally experienced stability issues with ALSA as modules and in fact whenever I've had "issues", sometimes I've found that having modules (oddly) solved them.